The creative team of Star Trek: The Next Generation - from left to right; David Livingston, Rick Berman, Gene Roddenberry, Michael Piller, Peter Lauritson, Rob Legato, Dan Curry. Not seen is Ron Moore, who took this photo.This photo and the above c… — The creative team of Star Trek: The Next Generation - from left to right; David Livingston, Rick Berman, Gene Roddenberry, Michael Piller, Peter Lauritson, Rob Legato, Dan Curry. Not seen is Ron Moore, who took this photo.

This photo and the above caption are from TrekCore.com - A fantastic Star Trek resource.

The Star Trek universe is vast and rich, full of inventions, ideas and creations pulled from the genius minds of 50 years of writers, directors, producers, artists, set designers and so on. But sometimes, it's the small things you notice while watching an episode of Star Trek that make you really appreciate the work of all these creative people. Small things like the dozens and dozens of fancy drinks imagined and created just for the Star Trek universe.

In my day to day life, I appreciate the quality of a well-mixed cocktail or the unique flavor of a home-brewed beer. I certainly am no connoisseur, but I would at least call myself an appreciative fan of all things that I can drink. So, to mix my love of Star Trek with my love of drinks, I will feature one particular drink in a post every now and then. Hopefully my detailed digressions into this particular minutia of Trek will pay some sort of homage to the imaginative and hard-working creators of this intricate fictitious universe. Ok, enough brown-nosing; let's have a drink! (In my next post :)

My first paranormal post!

Radar scope photo of the UFO over Minot AFB

Bill Chalker over at Science and the UFO Controversey pointed out some great research that was done by Thomas Tulien, of the Sign Oral Historical Project. The research covers a documented UFO encounter with extremely compelling evidence, AND... Spock's visit to Earth! Well that second part may not be true, but it's still a fun coincidence. In 1968, on the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, maintenance and security personnel spotted two UFOs over and around the base. What makes this story so remarkable is that these UFOs were spotted over the course of three hours by multiple personnel, and they were spotted on radar. The image above is a photographic printout of the radarscope reading of the craft.

At times, the craft made perplexedly fast maneuvers that were later calculated to be 90% the speed of light or 400gs. That speed was calculated from actual radar readings. Simply incredible. It is hard to believe that this encounter is not more widely known and reported on. You have to love a UFO story with tons of credible witnesses and reliable photographic evidence (although not very clear photographic evidence.) So much better than some backwoods yokel complaining after an unfortunately painful alien anal probing. I digress... Pilot and witness Bradford Runyon made these drawings of the craft and its maneuvers during the 3-hour incident.

Drawings of the UFO by former Air Force pilot Bradford Runyon.

And now for the completely necessary Star Trek connection... Does that craft look familiar at all? That's right, it's Spock's super fast science vessel from Star Trek (2009)! What was Spock Prime doing in North Dakota in 1968? Some scientific or diplomatic mission? Did he pop out of the worm hole there first before his encounter with Nero? Why did he zip around the base for over 3 hours? I will now remove my tongue from the proverbial cheek and say in all seriousness, check out the full report here. It's extremely detailed and really is quite amazing.